Teeth. We all have them, or start out with them. We’re supposed to take care of them, so we can flash a smile. But for Francis Bacon, they are a glimpse of death in a living human face, a white hardness that will persist when all our soft matter is gone. In Study of the Human Head, a man in a dark jacket smiles out with perfect teeth. Then you realise Bacon has superimposed an x-ray image of the human head on to this living man. It is the grin of a skull.
The National Portrait Gallery has assembled a truly biting show of Bacon’s portraits and meditations on portraiture. Not only is it the best Bacon show I have ever seen, it also answers all questions about his greatness. Was he a genius or a showman, a seer or sensationalist? Critics started arguing from the moment, in the 1940s, when he burst out of nowhere to shock a wartime London you’d have thought unshockable. The critic John Berger accused him of “horror with connivance”. Fans of fellow artist Lucian Freud still sniff that his friend Bacon was a slapdash, melodramatic artist. And they’d be right – but only if the definition of a great portrait was a recognisable depiction.
This exhibition is a whirligig of horrors without a shred of connivance. It exposes, like a body dissected on a table, both the monstrous modernity and the timeless humanity of Bacon. It begins, after an almost gentle encounter with a late self-portrait, with the disfigured, hollowed, claustrophobic portrayals of seated men completed in the late 1940s and 50s.
The poor soul in Study for a Portrait has the top half of his head missing as he opens a scream-hole in his face. Worse, his features are crushed into new, baboonish ones by the black matter above, so he seems to be evolving backwards. What perverse mind produced such violence? Bacon, on screen later in the show, confesses people tend to feel “injured” when he paints them. That’s an understatement. The man in Seated Figure sits neatly in an armchair but his face is a pummelled, minced mask of meat. It’s Bacon’s lover Peter Lacy.
The cruelty, you realise, is not Bacon’s. When this British-Irish artist, who was born in 1909, painted his hollow men screaming in transparent boxes after the second world war, there were so many new dead in the world that millions went graveless. The reason trainload after trainload of Jews could be taken to Auschwitz, as the historian Timothy Snyder shows in his book Bloodlands, was that the pace of human destruction in the death factory was unimaginable.
Bacon was the only artist who could fully face up to the reality of his time because he had no beliefs, religious or political. The show is subtitled Human Presence, but Bacon is not even sure we can call ourselves “human”. Portrait of a Man With Glasses III looks like it could be James Joyce, except the black glasses stop any light getting in or out, and his collapsed face appears to be eating itself. A matted patch on his forehead looks like exposed brain.
Bacon blows his own head off in front of you in his 1964 Study for Self-Portrait. He sits in jeans and shirt on his bed while his face explodes in fragments of black paint, spattering the air, leaving a grisly mess of bone and blood. Yet he counterpoints modern horror with a grand, heroic sense of the human condition he gets from baroque art. This expresses itself in his big, generous canvases, framed in gold, that situate the vulnerable figure in theatrical, ceremonial space. This exhibition deals brilliantly with his feel for the history of painting. There’s not only the illustration of Innocent X by Velàzquez that inspired his Popes but an original Rembrandt self-portrait he loved.
Bacon also learned from the Old Masters that if you really want to see a person, paint them naked. His 1959 Sleeping Figure stops you with its tenderness. We see Lacy snoozing naked on a sofabed. Bacon creamily recreates his contented face, nuzzled arms and fleshy thighs. But his relationship with the former RAF officer was anything but gentle: it was a sadistic love game with Bacon submitting. Once Lacy threw him out of an upstairs window. In a portrait painted after his death, Lacy lies with his feet towards you, glaring from a Mr Hyde head while you survey his naked form. I mistook the brown tube on his tummy for exposed viscera. But no. It’s a gigantic phallus invoking Lacy’s erotic, demonic presence from beyond the grave.
Wanting to paint a female nude, to take on Titian directly, Bacon turned to his friend Henrietta Moraes. In one of his great paintings of her, she is naked on her bed, body vertical on the canvas, raising over her apish head an arm that is marked with stitch scars or needle marks. Her opulent grey and pink rotundities and brown stains on mighty buttocks – Moraes described her physique as “herculean” – take you to the joy that Bacon finds in his work.
It’s the joy of paint. Right through the show, free splashes fly across perspective scenes. You are made aware, not of the picture, but the painter. When he fell in love with petty thief George Dyer, whose portraits are the show’s climax, he found his favourite model. But the shadow didn’t go away. It grew, assuming the shape of an evil bat in the show’s final masterpiece, Triptych May-June, 1973.
As their relationship decayed, Dyer killed himself two days before a Bacon retrospective was due to open in Paris. In the triptych, he’s seen three times through a hotel bathroom door in blackness, between Rothko-red walls, like a figure in a Greek tragedy or a looped film. He slumps on the toilet, pukes in the sink. Bacon has to watch this moment forever, because he wasn’t there when it happened.
But the real terror is that some time, in the next frame or the next, Dyer won’t be there: his flesh, already spectral over his bones, won’t even be a clear memory. The big expanses of sombre colour in this triptych plainly echo abstract expressionism, but Bacon despised abstraction. Without the man, he says, these colours would mean nothing. That lump of human flesh is the only thing worth caring about.
• Francis Bacon: Human Presence is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 10 October until 19 January
