FROM the 13th century onwards, artists in the Western Christian tradition moved away from repeating the established image-making of the Byzantine icon towards an increased sense of realism. Later, this came to embrace an understanding of perspective, an interest in landscape, and a recovery of the knowledge of classical art (particularly the representation of the human body).
Two quite different theological understandings of the event at Calvary informed how the dying Christ is represented on the cross. On the one hand, the agonised, scarred man of sorrows is a dejected, abandoned figure, horrid in aspect. Others underscored divine beauty, and, in the 15th and 16th centuries, Christ appears with the athletic body of an Adonis, his torso slicked with baby oil and wearing an impossibly white loincloth, as if advertising Calvin Klein.
I was repeatedly reminded of the argument over how to represent Christ triumphant, ever reigning, and the dying God man wracked with pain as I spent an hour and a half in this stunning exhibition of the portraits of Francis Bacon, many from private collections.
In our post-Freudian age, it is all too easy to understand Bacon’s oral compulsion to makes sense of his adolescent adventures at Dean Close School and his indulgence of petty thieves, lowlifes, and younger men for his own “Forsterism”.
But the portraits themselves are in no recognisable way homoerotic and include both men and women friends, such as Isabel Rawsthorne and Henrietta Moraes as well as his successive lovers, Peter Lacy, George Dyer, and John Edwards who became the artist’s sole heir.
As he explained candidly in an interview with David Sylvester (1966), he painted from photographs of his sitters to protect them: “If I like them, I don’t want to practise before them the injury that I do to them in my work.” Tellingly he concluded, “I would rather practise the injury in private.” He could distort a photograph in a way that he would not have bludgeoned his sitter in front of him.
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage. Photo Sotheby’s. c/o Cingilli CollectionStudy for a Pope I (1961) by Francis Bacon
The casual seeming brutality of this approach means that we come to understand more profoundly than with other portrait-painters, who are paid to flatter their subjects, the very nature of what it means to be human, to be enfleshed, and to be vulnerable.
Each stage of this exhibition is arranged around one sitter, so that the invitation is not just to see how Bacon’s art developed across the course of years from the 1940s until his death in 1982, but to understand his engagement with others. Bacon was very keen that his paintings be glassed in: he intended the reflection of the viewer to become part of the observation of the canvas. While this is sometimes more successful than at others, it does add a dimension to our knowing complicity with the artist.
Bacon is not an artist for the squeamish: he brings us closer to Matthias Grünewald and the Isenheim altarpiece than to Perugino or Raffaello. Portrait after portrait recalls Psalm 51 and the Lamentations of Jeremiah. A staggering achievement.
“Francis Bacon: Human Presence” is at the National Portrait Gallery, St Martin’s Place, London WC2, until 19 January 2025. www.npg.org.uk