Opening on 10 October, Francis Bacon: Human Presence will be the first exhibition in nearly 20 years to place its focus on the artist’s portraits.
Charting Francis Bacon’s career through more than 50 of the artist’s paintings, the exhibition will explore Bacon’s engagement with portraiture from the late 1940s, with a focus on self-portraits and images of key sitters made from the early 1950s onwards; including lovers Peter Lacy, George Dyer and John Edwards; and friends Isabel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes, Lucian Freud and Muriel Belcher.
Bringing Bacon and his sitters to life in an unparalleled way, paintings will be displayed alongside rarely-seen photographs and portraits of Bacon from the Gallery’s Collection – captured by leading twentieth-century photographers including Cecil Beaton, Arnold Newman and Bill Brandt
Francis Bacon has long been considered one of the most outstanding painters of the twentieth-century. Best known as a figurative artist, his work transforms the appearance of his subjects through an extraordinary use of paint. Francis Bacon: Human Presence (10 October 2024 – 19 January 2025) will be the National Portrait Gallery’s first exhibition to focus on the work of this important artist, and will explore Bacon’s deep and complex engagement with portraiture – from his responses to portraits by earlier artists, to large-scale triptychs memorialising lost lovers.
Featuring more than 50 works from private and public collections around the world, in addition to photographs of the artist, Francis Bacon: Human Presence will be organised thematically and chronologically, starting with works made in the late 1940s and closing with portraits painted at the end of his life, one of which remained unfinished on an easel in his studio. Through five key phases – Portraits Emerge, Beyond Appearance, Painting from the Masters, Self Portraits, and Friends and Lovers – the exhibition will chart the evolution of Bacon’s practice, exploring how he both embraced and challenged the traditional definitions of portraiture.
Bacon’s early works feature disconcerting figures, screaming or pained, as the artist explored how to depict humanity in a post-war world. The exhibition will begin by introducing viewers to a selection of these early paintings, including Head VI (1949) and Study of the Human Head (1953), works that depict anonymous male subjects. Both bear all of the visual conventions of formal portraiture. The sitters are presented in a traditional three-quarter-length format against dark backgrounds. In the case of Head VI, the figure is trapped within a transparent cage, while Study of the Human Head peers through striations and appears X-rayed, disconcertingly revealing the sitter’s skull and teeth. Bacon’s early work destabilised and the traditional understanding of portraits of powerful and successful men.
While he never saw Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X (1649−50) or Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888) in person, these paintings became great sources of inspiration to Bacon. From books and torn-out references that adorned his studio floor, he reimagined elements of each painting throughout his career, paying homage whilst challenging assumptions of what a portrait was and could be. Bacon’s interest in Van Gogh saw him move away from the creation of dark, monochromatic images, opting to introduce colour, which would characterise his future work.
As Bacon’s work evolved in the 1960s, his portraits became more personal and focused on a select coterie of sitters. At the heart of Francis Bacon: Human Presence are the artist’s paintings of friends and lovers, who inspired him throughout his life. Transcending likeness, Bacon’s portraits represent some of his closest relationships – including his partner, Peter Lacy; his lover, George Dyer; his partner in later life, John Edwards; his friend, Henrietta Moraes; the founder of the Colony Club, Muriel Belcher; and his friends and fellow artists, Lucian Freud and Isabel Rawsthorne. These clusters of portraits allude to Bacon’s biography – his sociability and tumultuous relationships – but also speak to his acute sensitivity to despair, grief and pain. While Bacon chose not to paint his sitters from life, he acknowledged that he could not paint them unless he knew them very well. These paintings are perhaps his most intimate and personal, despite their distortion. He preferred to work from photographs, sometimes torn and crumpled, which he had commissioned from the former Vogue photographer, John Deakin, some of which are included in this exhibition.
