This is a fascinating and thorough exhibition devoted to the relationship between Francis Bacon (1909 to 1992) – probably one of the most famous and recognisable of post-war British painters – and the ancient genre of The Portrait, which he dragged kicking and screaming into the post-war, nuclear age.

Second of ‘Three Studies for a Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne’ by Francis Bacon (1965) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage 2024. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia

Just at the end of the Second World War Bacon established his brand with the shocking Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. As you can see there’s a big dollop of Surrealism in the way he has painted what are, in effect, monsters, maybe enabled by the surreal visions of Max Ernst. But the picture contains three other aspects which were to endure in his work:

1. distortion of a basically humanoid subject
2. with a formal, portrait setting
3. sets of three

The nominal subject, ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’ is, of course, an extremely traditional subject, going back nearly two thousand years. Bacon has obviously chucked a bucket of post-war Angst in the face of the entire tradition to create something monstrous and yet… the ancient titles remains, and so does the ancient design, namely the triptych i.e. a work of art that is divided into three sections or panels.

These elements – 1) the wild distortion of human appearance, 2) while retaining the key elements of portrait convention, and 3) sets of three – were to persist in his work till the end of his life, 45 years later.

Regarding triptychs, the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) says that this exhibition contains 50 or so works and yet it definitely felt like more. It was only in the final and largest room, devoted to portraits of his friends and lovers, that I realised why. It’s because what the NPG counts as single works are often, in fact, sets of three images. I counted nine of them = 27 distinct portraits, making the total number of painted portraits closer to 70 than 50. On the evidence here, the triptych remained central to Bacon’s art for nearly half a century.

Installation view of ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing (on the left) Three Studies for a Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne’ and, on the right, ‘Three Studies for Portraits’ (photo by the author)

Origins

In the late 1940s and early 1950s Bacon’s images of people metamorphosing into screaming chunks of meat shocked and scandalised the art world, here and abroad. They were quickly associated with those twin blows to human dignity, the revelation of the Holocaust death camps and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. It became an instantly recognisable brand. But arguably the overfamiliarity of some of his cardinal images (the screaming pope, a body like a haunch of meat on a raised platform) obscure the variety of what he actually painted and its striking development and evolution over the long period from the late 1940s to the early ’90s.

Certainly they can easily overshadow the continuity of his interest in the genre of The Portrait and, in particular, portraits of specific, named individuals. This exhibition is the first in 20 years to concentrate only on Bacon’s portraits, to consider them within the genre and tradition of portraiture, to show how his style of painting portraits changed and evolved over his long career. In the second and central part, it concentrates very much on a handful of repeat sitters – six or seven in all – and Bacon’s relationships with them as friends and (gay) lovers.

In one sense Bacon never developed beyond the extremity of this ‘primal scream of pain’ vision of humanity. And yet, to walk through this exhibition is to quickly realise how the original vision was tempered, modified and, ultimately, domesticated.

The exhibition is divided into five sections:

1. Portraits Emerge
2. Beyond Appearance
3. Painting from the Masters
4. Self Portraits
5. Friends and Lovers

1. Portraits Emerge

Includes Head VI (1949) and Study of the Human Head (1953), works that depict anonymous male subjects. Both bear all of the visual conventions of formal portraiture. The sitters are presented in a traditional three-quarter-length format against dark backgrounds and yet, as you can see, all the politeness of traditional portraiture has been thrown out in favour of searing extremity.

‘Head VI’ by Francis Bacon (1949) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage 2024. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Arts Council collection

In Head VI, the figure is trapped within a transparent cage, while Study of the Human Head peers through striations and appears X-rayed, disconcertingly revealing the sitter’s skull and teeth.

Bacon’s early work was devastatingly innovative, capturing the post-war mood of horror and despair at the bankruptcy of civilisation and morality, and the ongoing terror of the Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation.

2. Beyond Appearance

In the early 1950s, Bacon attempted to paint sitters from life in the studio. The heightened drama of the screaming figures made way for portraits that were more individualised, representing his friends and lovers. Bacon avoided traditional domestic settings for his portraits – he detested a ‘homely atmosphere’ – preferring to isolate individuals against an ambiguous dark background within a cage-like framing device.

there are several classics of this type, notably a portrait of R.J. Sainsbury, against one of his jet black backgrounds but confined in the ghostly outline of some kind of cuboid cage. What I noticed about the handful of works in this section was how smartly dressed they were. You can see the white shirt and black tie and dark suit and it all feels as if, despite the nuclear holocaust they seem to have got caught up in, they’re still maintaining the courtesies and manners.

3. Painting from the Masters

This room reveals Bacon’s obsession with two paintings. It’s widely known that he was obsessed with Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X (see Head VI above and the link to the Portrait with Meat). I didn’t know that he was equally as obsessed with a less well-known work by Van Gogh titled The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888).

Bacon obsessively reworked it and this room contains 2 or 3 huge sketches for reworkings and they are a revelation. I never know that Bacon could actually be bad. These works, albeit unfinished, are dire. they’re wretched. They’re rubbish. Especially given that a whole exhibition of Van Gogh originals is taking place a few hundred yards away in the national Gallery, these are embarrassingly bad. I’m amazed anyone connected with the artist let them be displayed.

Installation view of ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing ‘Study for Portrait of Van Gogh VI’ and ‘Study for Portrait of Van Gogh IV’, both 1957 (photo by the author)

OK, maybe they’re only studies and never meant to be exhibited, but still… And anyway, next to them is a ‘finished’ work which Bacon did exhibit. It’s bad, too, isn’t it? Embarrassing. I thought it was a spoof.

‘Homage to Van Gogh’ by Francis Bacon (1960) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2024. Gothenburg Museum of Art

Photos

Bacon ripped photos of art works out of magazines and books and strewed them around his notoriously messy studio, spattered in paint, dropped on the floor, crumpled up and walked over. He found it easier to work from these heavily degraded objects than from pristine poster-sized images.

This habit coincided with the way that, by the late 1950s he’d gotten bored of trying to paint portraits from life. He found the presence of the sitter in the studio inhibiting and restricting and so, from the end of the 1950s onwards, he increasingly used photos of his sitters as the basis of his portraits. Photos don’t fidget, move or need entertaining.

This working-from-photos approach also allowed him the freedom to ‘distort’ the image as he wanted to without having to worry about the reaction of the sitters, who were sometimes quite upset by the finished product. In one interview he spoke about the ‘injury’ which knew he could inflict through his interpretations.

And this also explains why, alongside the 70 or so paintings, the exhibition includes some 35 photos. Now many of them are of Bacon himself, who was increasingly sought after as a subject by top name international snappers such as Cecil Beaton, Bill Brandt, Irving Penn, Arnold Newman, Mayotte Magnus and many more.

Francis Bacon by Mayotte Magnus (1972) © Mayotte Magnus / National Portrait Gallery, London

But there are also plenty of examples of the photos he commissioned and used as the basis for his portraits, especially taken by the house photographer of Soho, John Deakin. So we see black-and-white photos of regular Bacon sitters such his friend Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne and so on.

There are also three videos of Bacon, including an interview with art critic David Sylvester, a long-term supporter and writer on his work.

4. Self Portraits

The exhibition has a drily humorous quote from Bacon on the wall of this section:

I’ve done a lot of self-portraits, really because people have been dying around me like flies and I’ve had nobody else to paint but myself.

Despite saying that he ‘loathed’ his own face, Bacon painted over 50 self-portraits and a dozen or so of them are on display here. The curators claim they offer ‘an extraordinary range of responses to his body, psyche and ego over time’ and that they ‘not only track the artist’s relationship with his appearance and his artistic and sexual identities, but also trace his changing technique and innovations in format’.

To be honest, I couldn’t really see this except in the narrow sense that the ‘sitting-on-a-sofa’ self portrait looked very like the scores of ‘sitting-on-a-sofa-portraits’ he did of friends and lovers. The example the gallery’s press team included in the selection we reviewers are allowed to reproduce, for me demonstrates a completely different point, which is how homely and domestic his later work became.

‘Self portrait’ by Francis Bacon (1987) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage 2024. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Private Collection, NYC

Sweet. He looks like a chubby schoolboy from the 1940s. It could be the cover of a young adult fiction book, certainly of a modern graphic novel. The screaming pope and hunks of meat vibe has completely disappeared.

5. Friends and Lovers

The final section is, according to the curators, the core of the whole show. It brings together about 20 portraits of the lovers (George Dyer, Peter Lacy) and close friends (Henrietta Moraes, Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne) who he painted again and again in the later 1970s and ’80s.

Having told us about photographs in Bacon’s practice, the exhibition now brings together contemporary photos of each of these people accompanied by panels which tell us about their lives and relationships to Bacon – and these are placed next to his portraits of them.

The result combines art criticism with quite a lot of gossip, and smatterings of social history about Soho Bohemian life in the 1950s and ’60s, mildly interesting to the average visitor, gold dust to the committed Bacon fan.

For example we get potted biographies of Bacon’s three principle partners, Peter Lacey (1916 to 1962), George Dyer (1934 to 1971) and John Edwards (1949 to 2003) (such white, English names, aren’t they?)

Peter Lacey was Bacon’s long-term partner during the 1950s. The curators tell us that:

The relationship endured almost a decade in spite of numerous complications, absences, infidelities and episodic violence. During their time together, Lacy squandered his inheritance and moved from London to Barbados to Henley-on-Thames. He eventually settled in Tangier, where he played piano in a local bar.

We read that Bacon himself was devastated to learn of Lacey’s death by telegram shortly after the opening of his career-defining retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1962. Bacon responded with a small triptych of portraits that memorialised their relationship. In fact it was from that moment that his work began to take a more personal turn and portray friends and lovers rather than unnamed or invented figures.

A decade later, Bacon lost his second lover George Dyer, another potent presence in so many of his paintings. Dyer’s death in 1971 triggered Bacon to make a series of self-portraits which capture his grief and isolation.

‘Self portrait, 1973’ by Francis Bacon © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage 2024. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Private Collection

I’m afraid I couldn’t help thinking of the famous quote from Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest:

‘To lose one life partner, Mr Bacon, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.’

My view

I like the earliest work best. I like the screaming popes and X-ray horrors. In my opinion they have the shock of the new. You can tell that he’s just invented the approach and is experimenting with all the new possibilities it opens up. And also they speak of the times and the new horrors revealed about human nature. They also have a strong science fiction vibe, which I enjoy.

‘Study of the Human Head’ by Francis Bacon (1953) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2024. Private Collection

But, in my opinion, this kind of melted molten flesh vibe quickly became a manner and a cliché. J.S. Lewinski’s photomontage of Bacon’s face seen from two angles, rather than shedding light on his compositional process or something, highlights how banal this vision can be. Overlap 2 or 3 exposures of someone’s face at slightly different angles and, bingo! you have the look. At one time these shots were taken as visionary depictions of a prophet of post-war Angst. Now any A-level art student can do the same on their camera phone.

Francis Bacon, 1967 by J.S. Lewinski © The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth / Bridgeman Images

Thus I found the last room which, for the curators, is the heart of the exhibition, the most boring. The more I saw the same treatment being meted out to his mates and lovers the more boring it became. Somewhere (in the 1960s) his whole approach became a cliché and a mannerism.

‘Portrait of a Man Walking Down Steps’ by Francis Bacon (1972) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage 2024. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Private Collection

I suppose it’s still disturbing for anyone who’s seeing them for them for the first time, and they do retain an unpleasant butcher’s shop ethos, and yet… It had become a habit and a routine. And the way he applied it to a tiny coterie of friends and lovers, as the show amply demonstrates, somehow neutralises the style even more, defangs it, makes it homely.

In the 1950s the wildest of his paintings seemed to say something searing about the entire human condition. By the 1980s they’re just stylised portraits of a handful of friends. Crudely, I thought: ‘seen one, seen ’em all’. The main interest for me in these studies for a portrait of George Dyer was the colour of his jumper. I used to have a jumper that colour once. I wonder where it’s gone.

Installation view of ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing ‘Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer’ (photo by the author)

I think this is really highlighted by the banality of the later settings or backdrops. The cage paintings take place in some eerie metaphysical space, like the void depicted by Milton between Hell and the universe. By complete contrast the clean steps and comfy sofas of the later works look like they come from Ikea. Clean the melted blob of flesh off them and they could go in the Habitat catalogue.

‘Henrietta Moraes’ by Francis Bacon (1966) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage 2024. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

Styles 1 and 2

Days after visiting it dawned on me that the portraits from the 1950s – ‘Head 4’ and ‘Study for a Human Head’ – are figurative. They actually look in every detail like portraits of human heads, just smeared a bit and with more teeth than you’d normally see, in a spooky X-ray style. By startling contrast, all the faces from the 1960s onwards have been melted and remodelled to look like the Elephant Man.

So there might be micro-gradations and evolutions I’m missing but, fundamentally, the exhibition shows that Bacon had two completely different styles. And, I’m afraid to say, I much prefer the first one. The second style, the melted faces, are – once you get used to them – not very scary. After you’ve seen 10 you’re becoming blasé and after 30 you are, frankly, a bit bored. But this is not true of the portraits done in style 1 for a simple reason: they’re screaming and, to a lesser extent, trapped in those black cells, confined by some fine-wired cage.

I suggest that both conditions – the screaming and to a lesser extent the cagedness – trigger strong and primitive responses in the viewer, a sympathetic sense of extreme pain or entrapment, which is why you remember them. Whereas once you’ve gotten used to the Elephant Man vibe of the Melted Style and become a bit bored by it, then – as I’ve jokingly suggested – you’re more struck by the interior furnishings or what the sitter’s wearing. Certainly there is almost none of the intense response you have to the stricken, gripping first manner. The second approach is a style whereas the first one reflects a plight.

Well, that’s my view. What do you think?

Conclusion

If you have a particular interest in the history of portraiture and how Bacon placed a massive bomb under it in the 1950s and ’60s, opening doors and creating whole new worlds of distortion and terror, then this is a must-see exhibition.

If you’re a Bacon devotee then this exhibition contains much of interest, with lots of biographical information about his relationships with serial sitters, lovers and friends, and over 30 photos of the great man and his buddies.

But if, like me, you’re more of a general visitor, then the show lacks the real bite and edge you might have expected from it. I liked the screeching men in suits in the first and second rooms but then burst out laughing at how bad the Van Gogh sketches are in room 3 and after that, in the last room, was saddened by how the glorious energy of the early works had become surprisingly tamed, mannered and domesticated.

Merch

It always makes me smile the way the wall captions in so many exhibitions talk about questioning this social norm, subverting that societal expectation, interrogating stereotypes, about radical this and revolutionary that and just as they’ve filled you to the brim with revolutionary fervour… you emerge into the gallery shop where you can snap up some simply delightful tote bags, t-shirts, fridge magnets, throws and scarves and perfect gifts for all the family!

You wouldn’t really have thought it possible but the National Portrait Gallery has developed an entire range of Francis Bacon-themed products to accompany this exhibition, including prints and posters, postcards and fridge magnets, fashion products, accessories, scarves, t-shirts and tote bags, baseball caps, books, homeware, and the exhibition catalogue.

• Explore the Francis Bacon Human Presence exhibition range of products

I think the Francis Bacon-themed checked socks are my favourite. It’s exactly what he would have wanted.

The promotional video

Related link

• Francis Bacon: Human Presence continues at the National Portrait Gallery until 19 January 2025
• Francis Bacon website

Related reviews

• National Portrait Gallery reviews