Francis Bacon, True to Life

Francis Bacon, Three Studies of Muriel Belcher (1966) (Detail). (Fair dealing / Fair use: small/cropped illustration for purpose of criticism. Please contact me if you require me to take this down).

Francis Bacon’s portraits float like skeins of light on disturbed water, a glimpse that’s never wholly seen. The painter is a searcher, uninterested in conveying moods or stories, but obsessed with capturing something impossible but alluring — the very presence of life. The National Portrait Gallery in London is hosting an exhibition, Francis Bacon: Human Presence, which leaves you with the feeling that Bacon’s paintings are no less philosophical than they are sensational.

To most people, Bacon’s paintings would seem crude, harsh, and ugly. A group of day trippers surrounding me registered their disgust in hushed murmurs as they walked among the portraits. I would implore anybody new to Bacon or sceptical of modern art that they should change the register of what they expect of art in order to appreciate these works.

To do so is to be touched by a man who traced unsayable thoughts out onto canvases with a success rate that most artists could never dream of. Relentlessly self-critical, Bacon destroyed a lot of his own work and set an ambitious and unforgiving binary standard of worth to his paintings, deeming them either worthy of the National Gallery or worthy of the trash.

Bacon started out in the thirties as a devotee of Picasso, and the Spanish master’s two principal innovations run through Bacon’s work to the very end — biomorphism, that’s the freewheeling rearrangement of anatomy in the service of the painter’s vision, and the contortions of features forged in Picasso’s cubist years. We see the influence of Picasso’s biomorphism in Bacon’s breakthrough painting — Study for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), and its refinement over the course of Bacon’s successful decades, and we see cubistic contortions in all his portraits of people he knew personally.

But Bacon’s pictures aren’t derivative. Bacon does something different with Picasso’s innovations. Picasso used biomorphism to convey mood and sensibility — here’s a Marie-Thérèse Walter in erotic swirls of creamy pink, here’s a crying Dora Maar fragmented like a shattered pane of glass in acid yellows and stark whites, and so on. Bacon’s biomorphism and contortions speak more to human presence itself, and the problem of capturing it. Bacon avoided “illustration”, as he called it, at all costs. There’s no attempt to convey any mood, but to rather render the feeling of somebody or some thing being there.

Representing people as they appear to the retina is better done, he claimed to his interviewer Melvyn Bragg, “by camera and cinema”. The point of painting people in the twentieth century was to capture the sensation of presence. He wanted “not an illustration of reality, but to create images which are a concentration of reality and a shorthand of sensation.”

Traditional techniques were inadequate to achieve this vision. He didn’t go to art school, which he was relieved about because “I would have been taught all of those techniques that I don’t want to know.” He wanted to make up his own techniques, “by trial and error” to achieve something “different and new”. His idiosyncratic set of techniques included painting on the wrong (unprimed) side of the canvas, throwing paint, using cleaning brushes and rags, tracing circles with a dustbin lid, and working from photographs rather than life, even of people he saw on a daily basis.

The paintings themselves reproduce badly in photos. More than any other artist, Bacon’s paintings must be seen in real life. This is down to what I would describe as the topographical nature of his work, with its troughs of raw canvas and ghostly remnants of paint “erased” with turpentine to the peaks of the thick and opaque smears of white paint, smeared out of the tube and onto the canvas.

Within this range of depths are varying glazes, textures, washes, splatters, smears, scrapings, and spreads. Those big monochrome expanses over which the drama plays out are often not flat at all but are textured like very rough sandpaper or spiky artex, the popular faux-plaster used to cover cracked ceilings.

Francis Bacon, Three Studies of Muriel Belcher (1966). (Fair dealing / Fair use: small illustration for purpose of criticism. Please contact me if you require me to take this down).

When it all clicks, it’s virtuoso and astonishing to behold. His middle panel of the Three Studies of Muriel Belcher (1966) is sparsely painted, but the likeness to the subject shines through the brazenly paired back yet piquant tempest of brush strokes.

Out of a moody pool of black and brown, white sweeps and dabs of paint form an arabesque tracing Belcher’s features. A single stroke of thick lead white forms her cheek bone and connects it to her forehead, framing a distinctly heavily-lidded eye. Her upturned nose pulls in the opposite direction, showing her prominent columella (the flesh dividing the nostrils) at the absolute centre of the canvas.

It’s an image so whole, so integrated, and yet so vital and so open-ended that you’re left feeling that you’ve never looked at it enough. It’s the same with all of Bacon’s best paintings — staring at them, you feel like you’re staring at an endlessly whirling spinning top, vainly expectant of the eternally deferred toppling over. The pleasure of beholding a great Bacon painting is a weird balance of anticipation and completeness. Bacon’s paintings are a record of a searching process which is handed over to us viewers.

His images of his lover Peter Lacy, a lost soul born into wealth but who was aimless and hedonistic, are the most restless and searching. The imposing naked Sleeping Figure (1959) only sketches the forearms and legs of the naked body in quick sweeps of thick paint broken over the texture of the canvas. As a portrait it’s abject and tender, sweet and hostile, monstrous and calm. Isn’t it true of love that we can cope with such contradictions?

These late 1950s and early 1960s images mark the start of Bacon’s artistic maturity, in which the emotive range and spectrum opened up after the monotonously dark crucifixions, screaming Popes, animals, and wrestlers.

Despite the darkness and gore of many of his images, Bacon wasn’t a misanthrope. He was gregarious and great fun to be around, he’s both shy and eager in television interviews and described himself as optimistic. We see that more humane Bacon from the 1960s onwards, concerned less with surreal horror and more with the people around him.

This range continued to open up as he studied more friends — Isabel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes, Lucian Freud, and his new long-term lover, the handsome and dapper pretty criminal George Dyer.

His portraits have a likeness to their subjects that belies the seemingly freewheeling handling of paint. Bacon, like Picasso, had a gift for caricature, and was able to pin down the likeness of his subjects in a storm of paint by emphasising their most distinctive features.

But mere likeness is only one means to a transcendent end. “I would like my pictures to look as if a human head had passed between them,” he said, “like a snail, leaving a trail of human presence and memory trace of past events as the snail leaves its slime.”

Portrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle (1966) (detail) (Fair dealing / Fair use. Small image used for the purpose of criticism, please contact me if you require me to remove this image).

It’s the images of George Dyer where Bacon’s powers peaked. The enormous Portrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle (1966) is an image of astounding aesthetic audacity that threatens to collapse into a mess but somehow rings transcendent.

Dyer is trapped in a vast field of textured colour, going and existing nowhere. His figure is largely rendered in extremes of shadow black and a skeletal white of thick, gooey paint. His silhouetted head is turned to show his unmistakable crow-like profile, from the blackness of this head emerges a self-portrait. Bacon’s eye gazes out of the abyss of his lover’s image. It’s an painting that combines desolation with poignancy in balance, all within a framework of picture-making that is beyond original.

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Francis Bacon: Human Presence is showing at the National Portrait Gallery in London until January 2025.