A London Exhibition Delves Deeper into Francis Bacon’s ‘Human Presence’

Plenty has been written about how Francis Bacon’s real-life preoccupations bled into his work. The beatings at the hand of his disciplinarian, horse trainer father. The inveterate gambling. Being loudly, proudly gay at a time when it was illegal to be so. The violent lovers. The sadomasochist who wore ladies’ lingerie. It’s no great surprise that director Christopher Nolan showed Heath Ledger a Bacon portrait to help Ledger inhabit his role as the Joker for The Dark Knight. But a Bacon artwork is so much more than a deep dive into the artist’s psychotic soup.

“Francis Bacon: Human Presence” at London’s National Portrait Gallery is the institution’s first exhibition of the artist’s portraits. Featuring more than fifty key paintings from across his career, the project offers a fresh chance to try and decipher the inner workings of one of history’s greatest mark-makers—a process that’s bugged minds since Bacon’s first paintings were unveiled in the late 1940s.

But “Human Presence” is about more than what made Bacon tick; the exhibition also functions as an appreciation of his stylistic touchpoints and innate understanding of how to make a painting work. Rather than having sitters in his studio, Bacon preferred to paint from photos—those of artists’ model, writer and fellow carouser Henrietta Moraes (commissioned for a 1966 portrait in the exhibition) are erotic and seductive. Yet Bacon’s painting from the images renders her as a writhing, porcine collection of creases and lumps. In the BBC documentary from the same year, Francis Bacon: Fragments of a Portrait (also being screened here), the painter said he worried his subjects might hate the way the paintings made them look. Being worrisome didn’t stop him, though. In 1967’s Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, Bacon depicts Rawsthorne (another member of his social circle) flinging herself around in a delirium of lost control. The anonymous sitter for 1960’s Head of Boy simmers with all the pent-up violence of a hatless prototype for Alex in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, the black square behind his head pushing the subject to the front of the work.

These portraits are of human beings as seen through Bacon’s inner prism of swirling perception—faces shown after the rose has bloomed and died. Gin blossomed noses, informed by Bacon’s fascination with medical deformities. Eyes and mouths macerated, smacked and tenderized like sides of meat. Ungenerous, unflattering images of faces smooshed as if against panes of glass. In his 1981 book, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze attempted to get under Bacon’s skin, writing that the artist “…pursues a very peculiar project as a portrait painter: to dismantle the face, to rediscover the head or make it emerge from beneath the face.”  Given Bacon’s respect for Picasso’s Cubist portraits, Deleuze’s theory has legs. Here is a painter depicting a head’s facets and planes seen from different sides, for sure, but Bacon also never shied away from what lies beneath: the glistening tubes, veins and sticky viscera. His 1973 self-portrait resembles a human heart sliced in half and superimposed on vague ideas of collapsing facial features.

SEE ALSO: ‘William Gropper, Artist of the People’ at The Phillips Collection

It wouldn’t be a Francis Bacon exhibition without a clutch of his papal paintings, of course, and the inclusion of Head VI (from 1949),1961’s Study for a Pope I (painted especially for Bacon’s 1962 career retrospective at Tate) and other studies acknowledge his obsession with Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. The gallery also pulls off the coup of bringing over another painting that shaped Bacon’s style. Seldom seen outside its gallery home in Aix-en-Provence and somewhat tucked away here next to one of Bacon’s studies of William Blake’s life mask (and the mask itself) is Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Beret, painted around 1659. Rembrandt’s face is coaxed from broad, brown and black brushstrokes, and Bacon often referred to the work as a painting totem. Elsewhere, there are nods to Bacon’s interest in Van Gogh’s technique, from his 1960 Homage to Van Gogh portrait to larger paintings splattered with tracts from Van Gogh’s color palette as Bacon strafed corn yellows and neon blues across canvases.

Most of Bacon’s self-portraits in the show are rendered as head-only close-ups. However, by far the most moving is an unfinished self-portrait begun in 1991. It’s a large canvas with a few sweeps of what look like pencil lines, the black outline of a box and the beginnings of a side view of Bacon’s head near the middle. Bacon threw out or painted over works in progress he didn’t like, so this is the only existing unfinished Bacon artwork. It’s unfinished because Bacon died from a heart attack midway through its completion at age 82.

London has more than its fair share of Francis Bacon exhibitions. It’s just two years on from The Royal Academy of Art’s “Francis Bacon: Man and Beast” blockbuster show. There were at least four exhibitions in the city last year featuring Bacon paintings and there will doubtless be more to come. The National Portrait Gallery’s “Human Presence” is a reminder of why Bacon’s surveys rack up with such regularity. Naturally, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s portraiture, and the paintings on show succeed in their continued mission to unsettle and alarm. But the inclusion of source material documents—letters, filmed interviews, the Rembrandt, photos and ripped pages from books from Bacon’s studio—shown alongside the breathtaking artworks offer a chance to look beyond the story of the artist as an enigmatic, troubled soul and admire the technique and deft skills of a wildly gifted painter.

“Francis Bacon: Human Presence” is on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London through January 19, 2025. Prior booking is advised.