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Artist or Maker: Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

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Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 1982.

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Notes: PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION

FRANCIS BACON'S PORTRAITS AND SELF-PORTRAITS

'All the Pulsations of a Person'

Michael Peppiatt

'Three Studies for Self-Portrait' (1980) belongs to a series which Bacon began at the onset of old age. Here the brightness and bravura of the earlier self-portraits give way to a soberly analytical, more naturalistic style. Gone are the rainbow colours and the provocative, swaggering postures of the 1960s and 1970s; and in their place, under the artist's implacable gaze, the subject is pinned - 'like a patient etherised upon a table' - against a stark black background to be X-rayed and analysed. Having recently turned seventy, Bacon was acutely aware of his own mortality, and he undertook several new self-portraits in a desire to catch his emotions as he watched himself grow old. In 'Three Studies for Self-Portrait', the artist brought the scrutiny of a lifetime to bear on himself: a gaze like a magnifying glass sweeps over his own features, subtly spot-lighting and distorting them, but with such fluent skill that they are never less than instantly recognizable. Bacon's aim in this triptych was to reduce and simplify to the extreme. The impasto which Bacon had whipped up into so many previous likenesses is replaced here by a calm, almost eerie translucence, as though he had seen through the ruddiness of flesh to an underlying substance as fine and ethereal as spun glass. The subject changes nevertheless dramatically from panel to panel, underscoring the mystery and complexity of all appearance, which changes from second to second. In his later years, Bacon became convinced that he was within reach of the one perfect portrait - the portrait that would sum up and surpass all his other portraits. If there had been one ultimate image, it would have to have been heads of himself, such as these 'Three Studies' which, unusually, he kept and consulted in his studio for a couple of years after painting them.

It is surprising how few other twentieth-century artists there are for whom portraiture - especially self-portraiture - played the central role it played for Bacon. Matisse certainly not, Picasso hardly so; and although Giacometti recorded his immediate entourage - his brother, Diego, and his wife, Annette - almost daily, he left relatively few self-portraits behind. The self-portrait, with its natural bent towards introspection and self-questioning, has flourished more in Nordic countries than in the South; so much so that one could hardly conceive of Munch's tormented soul-searchings had the artist lived in Nice rather than Norway. The only other great painter of the last century to have given as important a place to self-portraits as Bacon is surely Max Beckmann, whose whole career can be traced through the great, brooding images that he made of himself. And Bacon's own fascination with self-portraits derived to a great extent from his admiration for two other, unquestionably Nordic artists: Rembrandt and Van Gogh.

Bacon had always been obsessed by the way people looked. He was fascinated by the way an unhappy love affair, a trick of the light or a sudden surge of anger could transform the features even of close friends whom he thought he knew through and through. He himself linked this obsession with his sexuality. 'Whenever I really want to know what someone looks like,' he said to me once, 'I always ask a queer - because homosexuals are always more ruthless and more precise about appearance. After all, they spend their whole lives watching themselves and others, then pulling the way they look to pieces.' Bacon himself was no exception. There were few things he enjoyed more than sitting, preferably opposite a large wall mirror, in a crowded bar or restaurant and watching everyone 'carry on', as he put it. He loved following the ebb and flow of human pretension and folly - his own very much included. Generally his gaze was genial, but when something alerted his attention - a sudden row, the arrival of someone he disliked, a drunk bursting into tears - it became as piercing and pitiless as the eye of a hawk as it swoops.

What went on in the pale blue depths of Bacon's eyes in those split seconds of absolute concentration? The stare seemed on the verge of a discovery, as if it had cut through layers of grimace and disguise to a rare, harsh truth. Bacon was convinced that a person's appearance and their underlying character were indissolubly linked. 'I think the qualities of (people's) personality come through in their appearance,' he remarked. 'Very often a person's appearance belies their qualities, but generally speaking I think that you can, to a great extent, analyse their character from their appearance. And so I am certainly not trying to make a portrait of somebody's soul or psyche or whatever you like to call it. You can only make a portrait of their appearance, but I think that their appearance is deeply linked with their behaviour.' (1)

That capacity for piercing the façade and perceiving the confused, sometimes abject, sometimes heroic, human truth behind was to make Bacon one of the greatest - possibly even the greatest - portraitist of the Twentieth Century. Through his portraits, Bacon recorded for posterity an entire gallery of characters who, once seen, are never forgotten. A roll-call of his protagonists reads like that of a modern Dickens or Balzac: a panorama of late twentieth-century life filled with writers and artists, petty crooks, exuberant ladies, Soho characters, French poets, international financiers, East Enders: Peter Lacy, Muriel Belcher (both as her indomitable, everyday self and as a Sphinx), Lucian Freud, George Dyer, Isabel Rawsthorne, Michel Leiris, Henrietta Moraes, Gilbert de Botton, John Edwards. If one wanted a concentrated picture of London life, high and low, caught between Soho and the Ritz, one would only have to look at Bacon's portraits. They reveal unsuspected diversity and uncanny accuracy. However much the sitter's appearance is pulled apart, pummelled and deformed, he or she is instantly recognizable (unlike, say, many of Giacometti's portraits or busts which, however beautiful and moving, are often difficult to identify). 'One day people will see,' Bacon once said to me, 'how natural my distortions are.' It was precisely this tension between deformation and recognizability - the degree to which one could 'reinvent' appearance without destroying its identity - which excited Bacon and drew him back so frequently to portraiture.

Bacon, who talked so penetratingly about his own work, often came back to this point, trying to define it: '... very often the involuntary marks are much more deeply suggestive than others... the marks are made, and you survey the thing like you would a sort of graph. And you see within this graph the possibilities of all types of fact being planted... if you think of a portrait, you maybe at one time have put the mouth somewhere, but you suddenly see through this graph that the mouth could go right across the face. And in way you would love to be able in a portrait to make a Sahara of the appearance - to make it so like, yet seeming to have the distances of the Sahara.' (2) To Bacon's mind, the element of chance was primordial to portraiture, as to all his images. 'When I was trying in despair the other day to paint that head of a specific person,' he recounts in an interview, 'I used a very big brush and a great deal of paint and I put it on very, very freely, and I simply didn't know in the end what I was doing, and suddenly this thing clicked and became exactly like this image I was trying to record. But not out of any conscious will, nor was it anything to do with illustrational painting. What has never been analyzed is why this particular way of painting is more poignant than illustration. I suppose because it has a life completely of its own. It lives on its own, and therefore transfers the essence of the image more poignantly.'(3) And later, talking to David Sylvester again more generally about portraits, he added: 'The living quality is what you have to get. In painting a portrait the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person. It's why portrait painting is so fascinating and so difficult.' (4)

Throughout the first half of his career, Bacon experimented with a variety of formats, much as he experimented with different techniques and materials. Then, around 1961 - being a man of very fixed habits, despite his bohemian lifestyle - he settled on two formats, one large, one small-scale, to which he then adhered unwaveringly. The small-format paintings, which are devoted to single heads, can be read in conjunction with the larger canvases, since they stand in a kind of counterpoint to them throughout the latter half of Bacon's working life. (5) Bacon moved constantly and deliberately between the two, executing a series of small heads whenever larger compositions were not uppermost in his mind, and vice versa, clearly relishing the shift in tempo and focus. Although many of the small-format paintings became triptychs, they often began as single heads which then triggered off other companion pieces - which in turn resulted not only in triptychs, but also occasionally in diptychs and even, in one case, a four-panel picture, arranged vertically, with one head mounting above another. (6)
Bacon began painting in series early on, prompted by his fascination with film and photography; but it was only after the early 1960s that triptychs began to occupy such a dominant place in his work. There were several reasons why Bacon favoured this form, as he acknowledged in various interviews. But the most obvious one was that three-pictures-in-one allowed him far greater latitude to explore the possibilities of a particular 'appearance' while conjugating and contrasting the formal discoveries and visual implications of each of the partnered images. In portraiture, Bacon remained acutely conscious of the need for constant invention, particularly in small-format canvases, where the scope and focus were so precise and so unforgiving. One of Bacon's touchstones for inventiveness in conveying a human likeness was Rembrandt, whose self-portraits he held in special esteem. What fascinated him in the Dutchman's later self-portraits (and above all in one portrait where Rembrandt's authorship is disputed) was the way in which, when seen close to, the head dissolves into a mass of totally abstract or unrepresentational marks. 'If you think of the great Rembrandt self-portrait in Aix-en-Provence, for instance, and you analyze it,' Bacon confides at one point, 'you will see there are hardly any sockets to the eyes, that it is almost completely anti-illustrational. I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks. And you can't will this non-rationality of a mark. That is the reason that accident always has to enter into this activity, because the moment you know what to do, you're making just another form of illustration. But what can happen sometimes, as it happened in this Rembrandt self-portrait, is that there is a coagulation of non-representational marks which have led to making up this very great image.' (7)

Bacon himself came to self-portraiture relatively late, the earliest recognizable self-portrait being the one he executed in 1958.(8) Looking at the major themes that characterize the first half of his career, one might reasonably conclude that Bacon had too many demons (dictators, Popes and other father-figures) to lay to rest to be able to concentrate on his own image. But, as middle age approached, Bacon's need for grand, dramatic themes diminished, and he became increasingly aware that the richest subject matter was to hand in his everyday life and his immediate entourage. It was at this moment, in the early 1960s, that portraiture took centre stage in Bacon's work; and as he produced one astonishingly living image after another of his close friends and lovers, he began increasingly to submit his own features to the same restlessly destructive and inventive scrutiny. Bacon never asked his friends or lovers to 'sit' for him in the conventional sense; but he regularly commissioned his friend, the well-known photographer and Soho wit, John Deakin, to take photographs of them which he then kept within reach while painting portraits of them from memory.(9) Deakin, as well as a host of other photographers, had frequently captured Bacon on camera, so that when he came to grapple with his own image, Bacon could refer to a mass of photos of himself which he kept scattered in the thick debris of books and images covering the studio floor.

Closely as he had watched the features and personalities of his friends, there was no face or psyche that Bacon knew as well as his own. As a young man fully conscious of his youthful allure, he had become adept at creating unusual and striking makeup effects; and it is not altogether frivolous to suggest that these early experiments in self-transformation greatly aided Bacon in his later efforts to 'paint faces'. (10) He also constantly scrutinized himself in the mirror, often carrying a compact mirror with him when he went out; and he was deeply conscious that success, both in the social and the sexual domain, depended on how one 'presented' oneself. Along with the deep familiarity he had with own appearance, in all lights and all moods, Bacon also benefited from a feeling of absolute freedom in manipulating his own features. If he professed a sense of committing an 'injury' to the appearance of his friends when he painted them, he had no such concerns for himself. Accordingly, no image in the whole Baconian canon was as brutally whipped up, hollowed out and summarily reassembled in unlikely conjunctions of eye and mouth, jowl and cheek, as his own face. Here, too, despite the inherent constraints of the genre, was an exuberant diversity: Bacon against green or blue or lilac grounds, oblique or elliptical, fleshy or ethereal, wristwatch to the fore (his lifetime ticking by) or already half-enshrouded by the blackness behind - as if, in old age, the artist were gradually painting himself out of the picture.

In his last years, Bacon returned more and more frequently to his own image. Sardonically, he would explain that since 'all his friends were dying like flies' around him, he only had his own 'old pudding face' left to paint. By the 1980s, he was moving towards an ever greater economy of effect: while his forms grew less distorted, tending towards a new naturalism, his colours became colder and more translucent, thinned, it seemed, by the passage of time. Where the backgrounds had been brilliant with contrasting colour, they now became uniformly black: bright daylight replaced by the encroaching night. The late self-portraits form a long elegy to the artist's acute sense of mortality as well as to his desire to pare his images down, with all superfluity stripped away. In one of the last interviews he gave, Bacon remarked that, with experience and age, painting became rather more difficult than less, because: 'You're more conscious of the fact that nine-tenths of everything is inessential. What is called "reality" becomes so much more acute. The few things that matter become so much more concentrated and can be summed up with so much less.' (11) 'Three Studies for Self-Portrait' (1980) is a case in point, since nowhere in Bacon's work is the desire to capture the very core of appearance and identity more evident and more poignantly resolved than in these late images of himself.

(1) David Sylvester: 'Looking Back at Francis Bacon', London, 2000, p. 234.
(2) David Sylvester: 'Interviews with Francis Bacon', revised ed., 1993, p. 56.
(3) Ibid., p. 17.
(4) Ibid., p. 174.
(5) The one exception, insofar as I am aware, is 'Triptych 1977', painted as a gift for a friend in Paris. The three small panels represent a view of Bacon's studio, another of his bed, and a self-portrait).
(6) 'Four Studies for a Self-Portrait', 1967.
(7) David Sylvester: 'Interviews with Francis Bacon', revised ed., 1993, p. 58.
(8) There are grounds for considering 'Portrait' c1931-32, reproduced as illustration no 5 in the Alley-Rothenstein catalogue, as a very early self-portrait - despite Alley's opinion that it was not.
(9) Bacon had of course been 'sat to' for portraits, notably by Bob and Lisa Sainsbury. Bacon's decision not to have any more sitters in his studio appears to have come about after Cecil Beaton had rejected the portrait Bacon had done of him. For Beaton's account of the incident, see Cecil Beaton: 'The Restless Years', London, 1976, pp. 100-107.
(10) Bacon's dexterity with makeup is wonderfully described by Michael Wishart in his autobiography, 'High Diver', London, 1977, p. 63.
(11) Michael Peppiatt: 'An Interview with Francis Bacon: Provoking Accident, Promoting Chance', 'Art International', Paris, Autumn 1989.

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