Francis Bacon: ‘Human Presence’
There’s a limit to how much you can say about Francis Bacon; to how many times you can talk about viscerality, the anguish of existence, the torment of love, etc etc etc, over and over. But we’ve apparently not reached that limit yet, because the National Portrait Gallery’s put on a big show of Frankie’s portraiture, and someone’s got to tell you if it’s worth 23 quid.
Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was a giant of modern art, maybe the twentieth century’s greatest painter. He’s been analysed and over-analysed for decades. It makes you walk into this exhibition (coming only two years after the Royal Academy’s Bacon show) and think ‘oh god, more Bacon? I’m already full, my cholesterol is going through the roof!’ Little bacon joke for you there.
But then you see the paintings – the writhing bodies, the contorted grimaces, the screaming faces – and damn it, call your cardiologist, you’re ready for another helping.
The show isn’t particularly well-organised , but it doesn’t matter. It starts with a pope and ends with a violent triptych of his lover George Dyer, and in between it journeys from friends to romantic partners to fellow artists and visions of himself. And the majority of it is stunning.
The opening corridors are filled with skeletal, corpse-like figures, shrouded in black and grey, locked in the cages he framed so many of his sitters in. Some are screaming into the void, others hang awkwardly in the darkness.
There are some rare, strange Bacons here. There’s a twisted multi