A fresh side of Bacon
A corking show of Francis Bacon's portraits and heads at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, organised in association with the British Council, reveals a side of Bacon's work we've never seen before.
Instead of the histrionics of the large triptychs and the screaming popes, it focuses on Bacon's most intimate work - his studies of his lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer, of friends Muriel Belcher and Isabel Rawsthorne, and of fellow painters Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud.
This is Bacon the private and complex man, capable of surprising tenderness and affection as well as of cruelty and spiked wit. Above all, the narrow focus of the exhibition allows us to concentrate on the way Bacon actually lays paint on the canvas, and not, as is so often the case when looking at his work, on the existential subject matter.
Whether or not he painted directly from the model, Bacon normally based his portraits on photographs. In display cases placed along the corridor linking the galleries, photos of his sitters reveal that no matter how he distorts a face, Bacon was usually able to capture a remarkable likeness.
But, instead of covering his faces with an epidermis of flesh, he excavates parts of them, using concave sweeps of brilliant colour to define the planes of cheekbones and forehead, while filling in other parts with a single stroke of the brush for a nose or a chin. In some of the heads, his technique is almost like that of a cubist, in others he reminded me of a sculptor working soft clay with his thumbs.
nd what a range of emotion Bacon can achieve within a limited format! When he paints George Dyer, the face comes out bruised and swollen, like a prizefighter after a match, as though, for Bacon, the act of painting were a substitute for what he would otherwise do with his fists.
But in a portrait of Peter Lacy sleeping there is a sweetness and protectiveness that you don't find elsewhere in Bacon's work. In general, the more handsome the man, the more viciously Bacon treats him. In a double portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, the poor artists come out looking like the masked women in the Demoiselles d'Avignon.
What is Bacon doing in these portraits? One answer is that he is searching for the essence of the person, that elusive and constantly changing element that is an individual's identity. But it is more complicated than that. The way paint is dragged in striations across the faces in certain portraits could also be a way of suggesting physical movement, or it might evoke the idea of a doubly-exposed photograph.
And for every brushstroke that builds up form, another seems to shatter it, as though the portrait were the arena in which Bacon can work out his conflicting feelings of affection and hatred for the person he is painting.
These heads are painted directly on the canvas without preliminary drawing, so that the image and the technique are inseparable. In Bacon's own words, "the brushstroke creates the form and does not merely fill it in".
In his portrait Miss Muriel Belcher he applies paint with a loaded brush to create a surface as richly impastoed as in a Rubens sketch, dipping his brush in more than one colour, then dragging it in short, striated strokes of green mixed with pink. He then stains the background with two tones of thinned green paint to suggest the space in which Belcher exists.
In these small-scale works, Bacon had no difficulty sustaining the interest of the painted surface from edge to edge as I feel is often the case in the large-scale subject pictures. This show reveals a Bacon that I, for one, didn't know at all. See it if you possibly can.
The Bacon show coincides with a small exhibition of the work of his friend Graham Sutherland at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
After his death in 1980, the reputation of a man once considered one of this country's pre-eminent painters sank like a stone. There were two reasons for this, and both were unfair: we tended to judge him by his later work, and also to compare him with contemporaries who worked in the international modernist style - with Bacon, of course, but also with Picasso and Giacometti.
