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It’s the pity of it that hits you. The very last work in the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition of Francis Bacon’s portraits is like a gut punch.
Triptych May-June 1973 is atypical of the artist’s work in that it clearly represents a real event, but then, not even Bacon’s imagination could compete with the horrible, prolonged death from an overdose of his lover George Dyer, in the bathroom of a Paris hotel in 1971.
The triptych, which depicts Dyer variously as he was found, slumped on the toilet; vomiting into a sink; and heaving with misery, almost engulfed by the inky darkness of his depression, is one of the saddest, angriest things I’ve seen – an anguished but controlled expression of the furious complexity of grief.
Bacon considered portraiture the greatest genre of painting, for its ability to express what it means to be human. And like many artists, he was in his enthusiastic, not always constructive embrace of the good and bad of life, a sort of human 2.0.
The NPG show is the first major exhibition to focus on his portraits in nearly two decades. I was slightly dreading all those screaming heads and contorted bodies in one place – there are more than 50 works on display – but somehow, despite its darker moments, it is oddly uplifting.
It is organised by theme and, broadly, chronology, so it’s possible to see his painterly development from the screaming, boxed-in popes of the late Forties, and his decade-long flirtation with painting from life, abandoned at the end of the Fifties because, as he said, if he liked his sitters, he didn’t “want to practise before them the injury that I do to them in my work. I would rather practise the injury in private.”
We see him responding directly to particular works by artists he admires – Rembrandt, Velazquez, Van Gogh – and, as he embeds himself into the tawdry, shimmering life of Soho in the Sixties and beyond, obsessively portraying those closest to him, from lovers such as Peter Lacey and Dyer to dear friends like Muriel Belcher, Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes and Isabel Rawsthorne.
And, like Rembrandt, there’s a continuous thread of searching self-portraits, despite his dislike of his own face (a generous inclusion of photographic portraits of him by other artists reveals Bacon actually to be rather handsome, especially before tenacious hard living took an inevitable toll).
There is, of course, in the distortion of his faces and bodies, a chronic vulnerability, an uncertainty, a disconcerting feeling of shifting ground. But with this, and with his frequent habit of transposing his own face onto those of his sitters, in my view like few others Bacon also captured the status of humanity as a work in progress - the multitudes that we all contain; the endless internal battle for supremacy between our best, worst and everything in between. His small head triptychs in particular capture this – I love the trio of Rawsthorne, flame-haired and full of intelligent life.
Actually, I loved all of it. Every portrait is imbued not just with the sitter’s presence but with Bacon’s own, like a novelist who ruthlessly mines his own life for material. Each canvas is full of feeling, soaked in volatile emotion. What could be more human than that?
