Francis Bacon, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads 
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh 
4 June - 4 September 2005 

A powerful new exhibition of Francis Bacon’s intense and forceful portraiture is the major summer show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2005. Francis Bacon is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the latter half of the twentieth century: this is the first museum exhibition to explore in depth his vivid and striking portraits of friends, lovers and other artists. Jointly conceived and organised by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the British Council, the exhibition comprises over fifty works, including self-portraits and portraits of Francis Bacon’s best-known sitters, on loan from public and private collections throughout the world.

Born in Dublin in 1909, Francis Bacon spent most of his life in London. He began working as a painter in the l930s and from then to his death in l992 the human figure remained the dominant subject of his art. Making portraits that reflected the intensity of his personal relationships was one of Francis Bacon’s abiding artistic preoccupations. This exhibition begins with small single heads from the late l940s, which echo the imagery of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion - the painting which caused a sensation and effectively launched Francis Bacon’s career when it was shown in 1945. There follows a group of large single portraits, some full-length, in which the human figure is depicted as a more integrated whole; and finally – the core of the exhibition – small heads of friends from the artistic and social milieu of London’s Soho – Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne, and Francis Bacon’s lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer.

The subjects in these captivating portraits are painted slightly under life-size and are seen from close to. Beginning in 1962, with Study for Three Heads, in which Francis Bacon’s own head is flanked by images of his lover Peter Lacy, who had recently died, these small canvases – each 14 by 12 inches, a format which Francis Bacon seems to have settled on in 1961 – are often grouped in threes. This format – the triptych – gave Francis Bacon the opportunity to show three different aspects of the same personality or to contrast images of two or more different people (including sometimes, himself). Like private, devotional portraits, these small heads open up a rich vein of intimacy in Francis Bacon’s art, and come as a surprise to those whose knowledge of the artist is restricted to his large-scale triptychs.

For a period in the late-Fifties Francis Bacon’s output of portraits was dominated by the image of Peter Lacy, with whom he enjoyed a tense and often violent relationship but who, it has been claimed, was ‘the one great love of his life’. Peter Lacy is the subject of five portraits in this exhibition, including two showing him asleep, which are remarkable for their tenderness and poignancy. The exhibition also contains a number of full-length portraits from the 1960s, their subjects shown standing, seated or reclining. Looking at these works one can understand what the artist Michael Andrews meant when he praised Francis Bacon’s ‘realism of palpable presence’ – the sitters appear so real that you feel they are in the room with you. Yet, while their blurred features evoke movement and life, they are also, perhaps, suggestive of dissolution and inevitable death.

Striking for their qualities of improvisation and immediacy, Francis Bacons’ portraits were painted from a combination of photographs and memory: ‘I don’t want to practise before [my subjects] the injury that I do them in my work. I would rather practise the injury in private by which I think I can record the fact more clearly.’ Increasingly, Francis Bacon himself became the main subject of his art, and the exhibition shows him in a variety of roles and states, from combative and self-assured to spectral and faint near the end of his life.

Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads demonstrates Francis Bacon’s attempts to revitalise the art of portraiture, following the crisis in humanist values brought about by the Second World War. The exhibition includes important loans from many public collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Hamburg Kunsthalle; Tate, London; and the Thyssen Collection, Madrid, as well as rarely seen loans from private individuals. The exhibition has been selected by Andrea Rose, Director of Visual Arts at the British Council; Richard Calvocoressi, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Philip Long, Senior Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; and Christoph Heinrich, Chief Curator of Contemporary Art at the Hamburg Kunsthalle. To be shown in Edinburgh during the International Festival, the exhibition will travel to the Hamburg Kunsthalle in the autumn.

A fully illustrated catalogue has been published, containing texts by Martin Hammer (Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and author of Bacon and Sutherland, 2005) and Richard Calvocoressi; published by the National Galleries of Scotland in association with the British Council. Special exhibition price: £9.95; normal price: £12.95.

SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART  
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh
www.nationalgalleries.org