Francis Bacon: Human Presence
The National Portrait Gallery in London will open on 20 October “Francis Bacon: Human Presence”, it will be the largest exhibition of portraits by the Irish artist carried out by the museum. Among the more than 55 paintings from the 1950s onward that will be exhibited, we will be able to see some as significant as several of his self-portraits, or the paintings of Isabel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes and Lucien Freud, and of his lovers Peter Lacy, George Dyer and John Edwards.
Henrietta Moraes, 1966 by Francis Bacon © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage
2024. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Private
The National Portrait Gallery in London will open on 20 October “Francis Bacon: Human Presence”, it will be the largest exhibition of portraits by the Irish artist carried out by the museum. Among the more than 55 paintings from the 1950s onward that will be exhibited, we will be able to see some as significant as several of his self-portraits, or the paintings of Isabel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes and Lucien Freud, and of his lovers Peter Lacy, George Dyer and John Edwards.
Standing out in the show are his obsessive studies inspired by the Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650) by Velazquez, an appropriation or reinterpretation of the past in the present, like his homage to Van Gogh as well, among others. Bacon strips the subjects of their appearance, of the artifice that man has in his public life or in the conventional portrait, to show their true human presence.
Head VI, 1949 by Francis Bacon © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024. Photo:
Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London.
For Bacon the portrait is the genre par excellence of painting. His heads are disturbing, some perhaps approach horror or abjection according to Bacon, like the mouth that screams exhaling all “the body” through it. They provide a reinvention of the traditional portrait and a unique treatment of this genre, which makes him one of the most prominent artists of the 20th century.
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who has written superb “portraits” such as “Nietzsche and Philosophy” or “Proust and Signs”, in his book “Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation”, says that presence is the first word that comes before a painting by Bacon. A presence that acts directly on the nervous system and makes the fixing of representation impossible, whose heads are prepared to receive deformations, like “Self-Portrait” from 1963, in which he is glimpsed with a pig’s head. This fusion of images he also carried out with some of his characters, attenuating the line that separates the artist from his model, as happens with Lucian Freud or George Dyer. Bacon considered that identity is something mutable and that it is deeply influenced by personal relationships.
Deleuze makes an analogy that describes very well what we see in his heads deformed by all kinds of forces, such as pressure, crushing or stretching. And he says thus: “They are like forces that an immobile trans-spatial traveler in his capsule confronts in the cosmos. It is as if invisible forces were slapping the head from the most different angles”.
Self-Portrait, 1973, 1973 by Francis Bacon © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage
2024. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Private Collection
Deleuze’s meticulous analysis of Bacon’s work is very interesting and in certain respects fundamental for the comprehension of his work, although these analyses never have an aseptic gaze since they are imbued with the passion of the one who observes, they are not neutral and therefore have their limitations. I think we can be assertive in affirming that the best testimony of art is always provided directly by the artists.
In this regard, the art critic David Sylvester, in an interview with Francis Bacon in 1966, raises the question of why he thinks people have the feeling that his work is horrible, to which the artist replies: “I have always wanted to convey things in the most direct and raw way possible, and perhaps if something is conveyed directly, they feel it is horrible, because if you say something very directly to someone about something, sometimes they take offense, even if it is a fact, because people tend to take offense at facts or what used to be called the truth”.
NG x138805, Francis Bacon, 1972 by Mayotte Magnus © Mayotte Magnus / National Portrait Gallery, London.
In any case, the creative process is an enigma. Bacon wondered how appearance can be created within the mystery of painting. For the viewer the mystery of creation makes our comprehension of the artist’s inner process unfathomable. The difficulty of observing oneself when the state of self-absorption, intoxication or passion that the creative act produces occurs distances us from this comprehension. The absence of oneself and of the real world transfers the artist to the world of the work. Therefore, he becomes incapable of explaining what has happened in the creative process when genius manifests itself in a state of absolute concentration. It is as if the unconscious took control at that moment.
Francis Bacon. Fragments of a Portrait – Interview by David Sylvester
