Francis Bacon at the National Portrait Gallery: an emotional tour de force

Francis Bacon’s distorted forms, caught in hellish moments, are seared into the brains of those with only a passing interest in the art canon, an uncanny familiarity that still doesn’t prepare one for the sheer emotionality of his major retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery.

The exhibition takes you from Bacon’s early portraits in the 1940s, through self-portraits and portraits of friends in the 1950s, to the personal relationships that shaped his work in the 1960s. She documents Bacon’s relationship to representation in his dismantling of traditional power structures and tortured memorials of deceased lovers.

Henrietta Moraes1966, by Francis Bacon

The exhibition is structured chronically and thematically and places particular emphasis on the provenance of early works. With these screaming, anonymous men, Bacon reinterpreted classical portraiture in a changed postwar world. Strongly inspired by Velázquez Pope Innocent X (1649–50), Rembrandt’s self-portrait with a beret (1659) and Van Gogh The painter on the way to Tarascon (1888), Bacon began incorporating color after his fascination with the latter prompted a move away from monochrome and toward a crushed prism of hues, from rich plums to sickly greens to deep pinks.

Man in gray suit on the stairs — *Portrait of a man walking down the stairs*1972, Francis Bacon

Most striking, however, is the depiction of Bacon’s personal relationships, cataclysms that sparked an acceptance of new styles and forms. His photographs of his turbulent long-term relationship with former fighter pilot Peter Lacy are characterized throughout by an unsettling tenderness, his naked figure a vulnerable contrast to the intensity of the details. After his death, Bacon created a triptych of portraits, a format to which he often returned when marking friendships or difficult fates. In real time we watch how the relationship dissolves, the faces become more and more sunken, the image becomes more monstrous, a scream of pain becomes palpable. When his lover George Dyer took his own life a decade later, two days before Bacon opened a major Paris exhibition, we see his grief turn inward. In a 1973 self-portrait, Bacon’s facial features are lost in a confusing loop, altered by grief and loneliness.

Man in purple — *Head VI*1949, by Francis Bacon

Next to Bacon the artist stands Bacon the man. He was fascinated by photographs of himself and we are treated to portraits of him by friends such as Cecil Beaton, Bill Brandt and Arnold Newman. In an interview that runs on a loop, he reflects on his friends’ negative reaction to their depictions, something he tried to avoid later in his career by refusing to paint from life and choosing to He knew it well to paint only from photographs or memories of friends and lovers. However, there was no escape from the emotions, despair and sensitivity that continued to characterize his work and are traced here in heartbreaking, raw detail.

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