Francis Bacon: Human Presence; Hyundai Commission: Mire Lee: Open Wound – Review | Francis Bacon

A A mist of fine dots spreads across the pale face with the distinctive moon shape. Scimitar eyebrows rise above a downcast gaze. The half-open mouth is as soft as a kiss and the hair still hangs in a boyish pony. Francis Bacon is 78 years old, but has already made it back to 25. You would recognize him anytime, anywhere.

This strange and captivating self-portrait hangs at the entrance of Francis Bacon: Human Presence at the National Portrait Gallery – a particularly misleading start to the “first exhibition in almost 20 years to focus on his portraits”. What did Bacon paint other than more or less human animals? It seems strange to single out these 55 paintings as portraits, not least because the only recognizable face is Bacon’s own.

It’s true that some titles half-promise a portrait – Studying for a Pope, Seated woman, Study for a Portrait. It is also true that others name a lover – former pilot Peter Lacy, who whipped and beat Bacon; former boxer George Dyer, who killed himself in her hotel room at age 37; the bartender John Edwards, who died of cancer at the age of 53. Still others represent friends: the artist Isabel Rawsthorne, the writer Henrietta Moraes and Muriel Belcher, owner of the Colony Room Club. But how useful is the word “representation”?

For example, could you really distinguish Rawsthorne from Belcher, or Frank Auerbach from Lucian Freud? Faces materialize from the darkness or deeply discolored colors: squashed, distorted, twisted, evasive, completely plastic and amorphous and yet so softly defined that one wonders how on earth Bacon manages it. Look closely at any image and you can see how he processes the color in blurs and fades, wipes and evaporations, blurred lines, vigorous swipes, flawless slices and dashes, but not how these transitions take place. He remains the most mysterious of all wizards.

The show begins with men in black, sometimes screaming, sometimes locked up, always alone. A mouth opens in a yelp, the top of the head missing from the seething blackness of the nightclub; A drinker in a smart suit leans against a contour line that suggests a bar. I don’t know who they are, and I doubt the curators do either. They could be Peter Lacy or Ronnie Kray or even Kenneth Williams; Bacon can go from torment to torment quite dramatically Carry on Funny, especially when the teeth in the howling mouth are pearly white and tiny.

And the NPG’s efforts to find lesser-known bacon sometimes result in outright farce. A very happy Pope in orange, pink and green splashes across the gallery in front of Bacon’s ridiculous reprise of Van Gogh’s work Self-portrait with bandaged ear; as if Vincent hadn’t suffered enough.

But soon we find ourselves in Bacon’s own familiar world: those flat backgrounds of glowing darkness and architectural sketch lines indicating nameless bedrooms, cells or bars; those faces that look as if they had been crushed sideways by a violent palm; One eye was fine, the other was obliterated and shattered at the back Battleship Potemkin glasses.

Muriel Belcher appears three times in a row, spinning like a whirlwind, with her drawn eyebrows, high forehead and thinning hair. John Edwards sits on a chair in his underpants, casting a pink shadow in the shape of a flightless bronze bird by Lynn Chadwick. Henrietta Moraes lies naked on a ticking mattress, her body is corked, black rings on her knees and buttocks, her facial features are distorted to the point of oblivion. The image is based on a photograph Bacon commissioned from John Deakin, who sold copies of it to sailors in Soho for 10 shillings each.

In his catalog essay, filmmaker John Maybury has a compelling line for the gay community at Belcher’s club when homosexuality was still illegal: “The fearlessness of emboldened alcoholics allowed them to scream into the void in a small, nicotine-stained green room.” That brings the power of Bacon’s art in a nutshell; maybe even the composition and color. The vibrant green of the Colony Room is particularly reflected in the paintings of Peter Lacy, described as the love of Bacon’s life. Not that you’ll have any real idea of ​​this relationship from the small selection of close-up heads featured here.

Restless, shocking, claustrophobic: that’s what they say about his art. And at one point Bacon himself is quoted as asking whether Lacy’s neurosis had somehow crept into the pictures. But how can anyone really know that when they are just as condensed and distorted as everyone else? And what about the exuberance, energy and overwhelming beauty of Bacon’s art?

One revelation from this show might be the meaning of color. Bacon was a sensationally gifted colorist: a gorgeous cobalt blue flows from the bottom of a painting; Purple, gold and papal purple shine from each other; Scarlet and orange burn so hot that they light up both the mood and the gallery. And Bacon seems to use different palettes for his lovers. He admired George Dyer’s profile so much that he created a template to reuse. you see it against the midnight blackness, but also against an alizarin crimson that seeps into the canvas like spilled blood, especially in the final triptych of Dyer’s suicide.

The curators seem to want us to discover biography, event and narrative in these paintings; but such interpretations seem like an overlay. If Bacon can base his image of Lucian Freud on a photograph of Franz Kafka, the result is something more (or less) than a portrait. And when one of his own self-portraits includes Freud’s body, the literal appearance is not at stake. Rather, these paintings’ relationship to similarity lies in their radical similarity to each other at their best – images of life forces so vibrant, original and wild that they exist outside the old conventions of portraiture.

Just in time for Halloween, the South Korean artist Mire Lee has filled Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with ghosts and ghouls in the form of what she calls “skins” stretched tightly onto metal frames dangling from the ceiling. Munch’s The screamHowling banshees, giant spiders, horror shop masks and thrashing ghosts swing and flutter in the air. Each is the color of dried blood, stained by the paint that drips like steady rain from a giant turbine spinning slowly above us, wrapped in dripping, fluttering tentacles.

Panels explain the connections to our industrial past and the toll it takes on humanity. The skins apparently speak of our anatomy, which is made clear by Lee’s title: Open wound. The entire installation gets darker as the months go by, as the hue of the dye deepens and, one probably hopes, so does the metaphorical meaning.

It’s raining, it’s boiling; the skins tremble and multiply. There are now 98, and by March next year there will be 150. But I can’t imagine that the numbers will play a role. Nothing looked more fascinating up close, nothing evolved, nothing presented itself better to the eye, the ear or the mind than the spectacle of it all upon entry, which was pure mechanical nonsense.

Star ratings (ours out of five)
Francis Bacon: Human Presence ★★★★
Hyundai Commission: Mire Lee: Open wound ★★